EarthWorks Geospatial Catalog

This datalayer contains polygons representing Massachusetts Priority Natural Vegetation Communities : Pine Barrens Community Systems produced by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass). The data covers only a portion of southeastern Massachusetts including the towns of Plymouth, Kingston, Bourne, Carver, and Wareham, Massachusetts.
Pine Barrens Systems are a mosaic of pitch pine and scrub oak, with heath and grassy openings, located on nutrient-poor, acidic, drought-prone soils.
Due to spatial accuracy issues, the UMass data should be used for regional analysis only, at scales of 1:30,000 and smaller.
The datalayer can be used with the MassGIS datalayer: Priority Natural Vegetation Communities : Pine Barrens Community Systems, which covers a portion of eastern Massachusetts excluding the areas covered by this UMass datalayer.
This layer is part of the MassGIS Priority Natural Vegetation Communities dataset, which depicts the distribution of the eight natural community systems identified by the Massachusetts Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program (NHESP) as most critical to the conservation of the Commonwealth's biological diversity (Barbour et al., 1998).